BitTorrent Partners with TV and Movie Companies

An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent Inc just announced that they teamed up with several TV and Movie companies. The new list of partners includes 20th Century Fox, Paramount PicturesG4, Kadokawa Pictures USA, Lionsgate, MTV Networks (Comedy Central, MTV and more), Palm Pictures and Starz Media. These deals will add a great deal of content to the BitTorrent video store, including popular movies like Mission: Impossible III and X-Men The Last Stand and popular TV-show such as "Prison Break" and "South Park""

Comments

So lets get this straight

[tttonyyy]

The MPAA are working with BitTorrent Inc (a US company) to move their content away from illegal copies to a commercial business case.

The RIAA are working against AllofMP3 (a RU company) to move their business away from legally selling material to a non-existant case.

Something's a bit twisted about that.

Does this effect me?

[Inexile2002]

I really didn't know there was a BitTorrent Corporation, I didn't know that they were trying to be all legitimate and everything, but I don't think I'll use their store, buy their content or even really notice that they're doing anything. I'm using uTorrent (and formerly ABC after I switched from Azureus) and visiting a small list of torrent sites semi-regularly and generally going about my business. Does this effect the average user like me in any way?

I'm also curious, if Peerguardian or the like has blocked ports to any of these companies, would this affect their new BitTorrent service? I haven't really looked at the block lists in Peerguardian but I'm pretty sure some movie companies are in there. Are they trying to backdoor their way around block lists or are they really planning on distributing their content on open networks? Just curious.

BOGO

[PingSpike]

You mean I can pay for the movie I'm downloading AND provide the seller with the bandwidth to do it? What a fantastic opportunity for consumers to share the crippling costs that hollywood is enduring!

Hard (engineering) problem.

[Kadin2048]

This is because nobody has yet found a way to make an inexpensive handheld display that has anything approaching the resolution, reflectivity, and contrast ratio of ink on paper; not to mention the battery life.

To simulate a paper book you'd need something that had a contrast ratio of about 80:1, an ISO brightness (reflectivity at 457nm held at 45deg incident) of 80-90, and a resolution of somewhere around 300 dpi, which means a 2400x3000 pixel display for 8"x10".

I think it might just be that making an ebook reader that can compete with a technology that we've perfected over the last 1,000-plus years, is harder than putting a person on the moon or making an artificial eye.

I can't be the only person who's thought this

[Adriax]

Why not just cut a chunk of the video file out, critical data that will make the file unplayable without, and a nontrivial amount so it can't be reconstructed.
Take that data, encrypt it with the victim's assigned key, and distribute the video in 2 parts. The encrypted part is personally downloaded, while the bulk data is torrented. Then you just have a special plugin for windows media player or something else that reads both file streams and reconstructs on the fly, never recreating the real file.
20megs out of a 600meg movie would be trivial for them to serve to people and they'd still get the benefit of 600megs torrented.